We’ve used Disqus, the online commenting system, for years. With built in spam protection, a nice interface, and storage of your comments in the cloud and not on our server, Disqus has made it easy to manage and store comments, and hopefully it’s made it easy for our readers to comment as well. A couple of weeks ago, Disqus quietly rolled out a new feature that could make it more fun for you to leave comments here at OnMSFT.com (or anywhere that uses Disqus). Now, you can add HTML styling to your comments with a simple interface:
To use the new formatting features, just write your comments as usual, highlight the bits you’d like to make bold, or underlined, or strikethrough etc., and apply the formatting. You won’t be able to see the results until you post your comment, as Disqus explains:
We considered implementing a full rich text editor, which would allow users to apply and see different formatting options while composing comments. However, this implementation would have caused significant increases in load time. So we decided to stick with and improve HTML tags in an effort to improve the commenting experience for everyone, while also not impacting load times for Disqus or our publisher partners.
Remember that you can edit your comments, and also note that Disqus provides spam moderation, so don’t take that link button to mean that you’ll be able to game the system, you won’t (and we’ll be watching and will turn off the ability to use links in comments if it becomes a problem).
So have fun emphasizing the brilliance of your comments, but don’t get too carried away! By the way, this is a good time to thank all of our readers and commenters for their contributions to this site, we’re constantly impressed by the passion, knowledge, and enthusiasm our readers showcase in their many comments, and we’re proud to include your voice as part of our community.
